Natural Language Processing and Social Dynamics lab (NASLAB): The research in the lab is focused on the computational processing of language with special focus on the way language is used in different social contexts and the ways meaning changes and evolves over time and space. We develop and use state of the art computational methods in order to learn how language brings people together and how it may drive them apart. While algorithmic at its core, this challenging endeavor is multidisciplinary in nature, involving computer science, linguistics, political science and sociology. Indeed we collaborate with scholars of all these fields.
If you are interested in this line of research and want to join the lab please drop for a visit or drop us a line.
Location: building 96, room 105.
Latest News
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Thesis defense: Yoav Tulpan (April 2023), and Ifat Refaeli (May 2023). Congratulations!
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Awards: Avrahami Israeli awarded Dean's honor for PhD student. (2022-2023)
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Invited Talk (April 2023): LLMs in Education - background, threats and opportunities, BGU Rector's Teaching forum/seminar series
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Invited Talk (March 2023): Annual Conference of the Judiciary and Academia (closed event due to the looming judicial crisis)
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Recorded Interview (March 2023): NLP, the research at the lab and at DPS@BGU (שלושה שיודעים, כאן-11, Heb, 60min)
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Talk (February 2023): Modeling Decentralized Group Coordination at Large Scale, Stanford NLP seminar series
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Talk (February 2023): A Killer Application: Machine Learning Analysis as Evidence in Court, Berkeley Law & Tech Speaker Series
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New Paper (COLING, 2022): Detecting Suicide Risk in Online Counseling Services: A Study in a Low-Resource Language (with Amir Bialer, Daniel Izmaylov, Avi Segal, Yossi Levi-Belz, & Kobi Gal).
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New Paper (EMNLP, 2022): How to Do Things without Words: Modeling Semantic Drift of Emoji (with Eyal Arviv).
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Establishing a new Research Center: The university approved the establishment of the Interdisciplinary Research Center for Digital Politics and Strategy (status: מרכז בהקמה): DPS@BGU
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Talk (July 8, 2022): Modeling Decentralized Group Coordination at Large Scale, Computational Data Science Seminar, School of Information, University of Michigan
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New Paper (Expert Systems with Application [ESWA], 2022): Unsupervised Discovery of Non-Trivial Similarities between Online Communities (with Abraham Israeli and Shani Cohen).
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Paper (NAACL-WOAH, 2022): Free speech or Free Hate Speech? Analyzing the Proliferation of Hate Speech in Parler (with Abraham Israeli).
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Talk (May 29, 2022): Modeling Decentralized Group Coordination at Large Scale, Computational Data Science Seminar, Technion - Israel Institute of Technology.
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Paper (WWW 2022): This Must Be the Place: Predicting Engagement of Online Communities in a Large-scale Distributed Campaign (with Abraham Israeli and Alexander Kremiansky).
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Paper (AAAI 2022): STEM: Unsupervised STructural EMbedding for Stance Detection (with Ron Korenblum Pick, Vladyslav Kozhukhov, and Dan Vilenchik)


Projects
2019 Israeli Election
Contextual Discourse Parsing
Modeling Large Scale Distributed Campaigns
Influence in Networks (especially in the political context)
The Tide: racist and abusive trends in online communities
Digital Forensics (and the applicability of machine learning based evidence in evidence law)